Even academics who study wave dynamics are left scratching their head when they see footage of this phenomenon in action. One such wave-dynamics expert who spoke to the documentary crew, Arnold Van Rooijen of the University of Western Australia, suggested the effect was likely due to an exact alignment between reef geomorphology and water depth.

He initially thought it was a rare, one-off event until the crew insisted they had captured the wave happening several times under similar conditions and at different points in time. Nature does weird stuff all the time, but most of that weird stuff is usually a one-off event caused by a confluence of factors that will likely never come together in that exact way ever again. At least not while anyone’s observing it.